by Michael Meigs
One measure of the power of Arthur Miller's drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692 is the startling transformation of familiar actors. Tiny Sophia Franzella, now a junior at St. Edward's, has charmed audiences with her wildly comic and mischievous personae in The Imaginary Invalid, Urinetown and A Year with Frog and Toad. Here, as the malicious and vindictive accuser Abigail Williams, Franzella is smooth faced duplicity, a murderous woman-child driven by spite and lust. Hers is a finely understated performance, one that makes her all the more hair-raising because of her almost silent conviction and the restraint of her lust for her former employer John Proctor.
David Stahl, an Equity regular at Austin Playhouse, has acquitted himself of a wide range of characters in Austin theatre but those which remain most vivid in memory, for better or worse, are clowns -- the unnamed all-purpose player in The 39 Steps, the hypochondriac in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the old actor Henry in The Fantasticks, and Sagot, the prancing rouge-cheeked art dealer in Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Director Michelle Polgar recruited Stahl for the role of Deputy Governor Danforth, the chief inquisitor who entirely dominates the second half of The Crucible. Stahl is nothing less than terrifying, with his baleful stare, self certainty and the immense self regard of a small man in a position that surpasses his capacities.
Arthur Miller studied the historical records of the Salem witch trials, but he wrote this 1953 piece principally as an indictment of the obsessive Communist hunting led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (a body that three years later convicted Miller of contempt of Congress for his refusal to furnish names during a hearing). The witch hunt metaphor stuck like pitch to the investigators and did a great deal to turn public sentiment against them.
The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s most performed play, was first produced in 1953 and won the Tony Award for Best Play later that year. Set in 1692, it uses the Salem witch hunts as an historical allegory for McCarthy’s blacklisting of Americans and the Red Scare in the 1950’s. The same mob hysteria takes hold in both periods as Miller examines religious intolerance, perversions of justice and the individual’s role in society. The Crucible, which never seems to lose its relevance, explodes with passion, fear, and danger when a group of teenage girls, caught dancing in the forest, take their revenge on their Salem Puritanical society by naming names of townspeople whom they claim are witches.
